


The gates of heaven

by Shadowmun



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Angst, Character Death, does it count as character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-06
Updated: 2020-10-06
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:28:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26857465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shadowmun/pseuds/Shadowmun
Summary: First death to first real meeting of Nicky and Joe from Nicky's POV
Comments: 2
Kudos: 22





	The gates of heaven

**Author's Note:**

> little more than a character study, I am not sure, I am fully satisfied with it, but here we are...  
> Graphic! description!  
> as usual: non-native, non-betaread  
> and: I like constructive criticism... feel free to post whatever you think, especially, what you DON'T like... Want to get better ;)

The first death is always hard. It is more so for Nicolo. He has been dying for days, even before the battle began. He is starved and thirsty, but he was determined not to stop… This is, until that Arab soldier lunges at him, piercing his stomach with his already bloodied, inhumanly fast, curved sword. Nicolo feels almost nothing, as it slices his flesh, but the pain explodes, when it is pulled out again.

  
With a desperate motion, willing to sacrifice even his very last breath for God, he raises his own sword and pulls it down again, nothing like the flowing motions, his older brothers taught him, mere disgraceful chopping. But it finds its aim, cuts through the infidel, almost separates his arm from his shoulder.

  
He is on the ground before Nicolo, their blood mixing below them. Nicolo envies him, as death still only brushes by, as he can feel pain and thirst and hunger become one. He gets dizzied and nauseated, when he feels a motion beside him, but he is too weak to turn his head, to even open his eyes. Slowly ever so slowly comes the night, its cooler air caressing his now feverish skin… He has no words to pray, no strength left, while the smells of death around him, within him, suffocate him. When the darkness finally fills his mind, he is thankful, welcomes deaths soothing touch.

Jerking awake again, everything comes back… The pain, the nauseating smell, the dead bodies all around him and the flies… Millions, millions of flies. Retching dryly, Nicolo bends over, but his stomach is empty, has been for days… finally he can muster up enough strength to stop it, to rise and to look around him, in the near darkness of predawn. Death is all around him, but he is not the only one alive. Groans and moans can be heard from different locations. Nicolo follows them, finding poor bastards even worse off than himself, unable to live, unable to die, damned to suffer on and on.

  
Nicolo gives what little mercy he can to Muslim and Christian alike, while he lurches over the abandoned battlefield, unable to join them, not knowing how or why he still moves on.

  
A small noise finally catches his attention, although it must have been there for a while. A small gurgling sound, far to promising to ignore. After some searching around, he finds a well that splashes water into a small fountain. He drinks as if he was trying to drown himself, water waking his spirit by the minute. It smells of rotten eggs and tastes of blood and worse, but it is still the best he could ever imagine right now.

  
Too late, when his guts start to cramp heavily, he remembers, that most wells around here were poisoned by the Muslims, before they retreated. He smiles, when death yet again embraces him, thankful to finally find peace.

  
This time, it takes much less time to be rejected from it, rising again, just before dawn. And this time, more aware of the process, he dreams. Only fragments, incomprehensible scenes watched through broken glass. Women, fighting strange men with strange weapons, an embrace, a kiss… horses, galloping over endless plains. A man, a heathen, washing blood from his hands, whispering in his strange, hoarse tongue, using the only word Nicolo knows, “Allah”, ever and ever again.

  
With absolute certainty, Nicolo recognizes the man. It’s the one who killed him, who he killed in return. Horrified, he turns back, starts to search for the place, where he died the first time, searches for the body of the man he struck down, searches for proof, the world is still real. What he finds, is his own sword, discarded in a pool of almost dried out blood and gore. The man though is gone.

  
Nicolo desperately searches around, trying to explain the disappearance. Maybe the retreating soldiers took him with them… although no other dead or dying Muslim was taken away. Maybe he just crawled away a bit… but neither does Nicolo find him farther away, nor does it erase the vivid memory of the body crashing into his side, before laying still on the ground.

  
Half an hour of fruitless search leaves Nicolo exhausted. And there are more pressuring problems than one… or maybe two… undying soldiers. Nicolo’s second search of the battlefield yields far better results than the first did, as it provides him with a filled waterskin, some food, some clothing much less stained and tattered than his own. He feels bad for taking it, stealing it from the dead, but it is that or joining them again. Maybe for good, this time.

\-----

Days, weeks go by in a hurry, while Nicolo’s thoughts revolve around the same thing. He has died. Two times, to be precise. He felt the pain, the fever, the coldness. But he bears no scars for proof. His body is as innocent as his mind is not. He has rejoined the crusaders, for shelter, but he has talked to no one, unable to figure out, if this is a blessing or a curse. If he is still rejected from Heaven for the sinful thoughts that plague him, ever and ever again, or if he was given a task to finally prove his worthiness to God’s mercy and forgiveness. Either way, he is reckless now. He does not care, if he dies again. The only thing he tries to avoid is being seen while at it.

  
Everything else is meaningless. Everything but fighting and praying. Dying and waking. And dreaming.

  
His dreams mirror his waking hours mockingly. Killing Crusaders instead of heathens. Wielding a wickedly curved sword instead of his reliable longsword. Praying in strange tongues to a strange God, rather than singing God’s praise in hoarse and shattered Latin.

  
Prayer… prayer gets increasingly harder each day, not because he expects any answers, not because he dies and kills, especially not because he is losing his faith.

  
But the things, done in the name of God. The things, he does in the name of God, they are what people told him to do. They are not, what he read, when he could study the bible during his training as a priest. His doubts are the festering wound that brings him to his knees, not his ever-repairing body.

  
One day, he spots his enemy across the battlefield. Just for a second, but this is no illusion. With a certainty known only once before he pledges himself to reach the other. To find him, to kill him, to end this, one way or the other. Every other battle is just a distraction, discarded as soon as his sword finds its aim.

  
He does not even see the faces of the slain, does not even feel the impact of the few attacks that hit him. He does not notice he is far beyond any other crusader and he does not care either. When he reaches his opponent, God’s mercy rains onto him, he feels whole, real, worthy.

  
With divine fervor he enters the fray, engages a deadly dance with the man, finding knowledge and recognition in the eyes of his opponent. This time, Nicolo dies first. And not even by the curved sword he loves and hates by same measure. A stray arrow has killed him, yet, he stands up again, as if nothing happened. Disappointment turns to something like joy in the eyes of the other fighter, when they find each other again…

Fighting with deadly precision, striking each other down again and again, sometimes even intercepting attacks aimed at the other, so they can continue their duel undisturbed.

  
Time rushes by, meaningless, deaths and kills come and go, the world itself turns slower when he fights this man, attacking and blocking, finding a perfection he never felt before.

  
The French call the fulfillment of desire the small death… Nicolo finds the real death no less fulfilling, spiraling closer to his enemy with every turn of the battle. When it gets too dark to go on fighting, he is so close, his final death for the day is caused by a mere knife, cutting through his throat in an almost tender motion. “Thank you,” he whispers, unable to produce an actual sound, unable to decide, if he addresses God… or the enemy who filled his day with a joy, so pure, it reached beyond the pain.

  
That night, still lying on the battlefield, staring at the stars, he dreams of love. Dreams of the two women, he always saw fighting, giving comfort to each other between the blankets. He does not dream of his enemy anymore. It’s not necessary. He will find him tomorrow, and he will give him the only comfort he has learned to give, another good death, worthy of a fighter like him.

  
But before that, another more taxing task is upon him. Once more, he scours the battlefield, giving a whispered word, a friendly touch and a clean death to those in need of it.

\----

Nicolo cannot join the crusaders anymore. To many of them have seen him, fighting the only man that matters to him anymore, killing and being killed. He is cursed, and they will know it, will try to kill him, burn him, dispose him in every gruesome way they can imagine.  
He doesn’t want to either. He feels dead, when he leaves the battlefield, barely able to eat and drink what he can find, and to sleep uneasily, dreaming of those women again, women that shamelessly mock him with their sinful ways, although they still seem friendly.  
He only ever comes to life, when he is in fight, every attack, every block another prayer to his opponent and to God. Give me this extasy, give me this oblivion, give me my final death. But day after day ends in disappointment, ends with the necessity to find another questionable shelter, another sparse meal, another cold night with thoughts that push him even further away from salvation.

  
When he dreams of the women, it’s their fault, he can do nothing about them, but when he dreams of the other man, dreams completely different from the ones before, he wakes up, sobbing and desperate, knowing, his dreams defile the pureness of the fight with this man.

  
He might be a heathen, a Muslim, a heretic, but he does not deserve what Nicolo desires of him. He does not deserve this damnation.

One day, it is over. Jerusalem has fallen, the crusaders have won, the remaining enemy soldiers flee. Nicolo follows, as good as he can, ridding himself of the crusaders mantle, ridding himself of the calling, he cannot follow anymore. But he is a stranger in this land, devoid of any support. He is too slow, too weak to catch up with this man he only ever kills anymore, because he knows his undying body will heal, again and again. He weeps in desperate fury, when he loses track, unable to find any traces left of the Muslim warriors, unable to return to the crusaders, far beyond their reach, probably for the best, as nothing good will come from them.

  
He is alone out here, with little water, few provisions and no more dreams to guide him, no more fights to lighten the darkness of his days. He wishes, he could find a way to end this all, even if it meant another damnation, reserved solely for those rejecting the wisdom of God by taking their own lives. But he can’t even imagine a procedure, that his mind can handle, while his body cannot.

  
His despair grows to the point, where any death, any coming back is welcome, be it through an arrow from a stranger, the claws of an animal or thirst itself. But he is unworthy of even this little charity, it just goes on and on and on.

  
It feels like months, years, millennia. But it isn’t.

  
One day, the other man is there. Again. Watching Nicolo from the distance, closing, when he is aware, he has been noticed, reaching for his sword in one, fluid motion.

They fight, once again. It doesn’t matter, where the man came from, why he came, all that matters is their reunion. Their fight. The renewed feeling of wholeness. Nicolo can barely see through the veil of his tears, but by this point, he knows their movements by heart, falls into a rhythm with his opponent, as two lovers would.

  
He is killed anyways, but he smiles, when he falls, smiles, when he wakes up. The other man is sitting close, reaching out, helping him up. “Yussuf”, he declares, with a gesture to his chest, and Nicolo answers likewise, before they fight again. There is no need to hurry now that they are alone. Thwarting the enmity between them, they are resting only a few steps from each other.

  
Finally, the enemy, Yussuf, sheathes his sword, and Nicolo knows, the fight is over. For now. They lack the words, the common tongue, to talk, but one day, they will. And for now, this is enough.


End file.
